Crudo
Olivia Laing
(Author)
Description
"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn't have a clue."
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.
From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it's not only Kathy who's changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?
In Crudo, her first work of fiction, Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel with a fierce, compassionate account of learning to love when the end of the world seems near.
Product Details
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
| Publish Date | September 11, 2018 |
| Pages | 160 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780393652727 |
| Dimensions | 8.3 X 5.5 X 0.8 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Crudo could turn out to be a novel that we pick up years from now to remind ourselves how these times felt... Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.--Alexandra Schwartz "The New Yorker"
[Crudo] manages to capture the delirium and anxiety of carrying on through [this] turbulent period with searing clarity.-- "Time"
[A] pretzel twist of form and meaning... Laing strikes some terrific chords in this novel.--Dwight Garner "New York Times"
[A] single moment in modernity, deconstructed by the savagely entertaining, Acker-inspired voice of Laing.-- "Paris Review Daily"
A narrative written with immense vitality and, miraculously, the lightest of touches... It's a subversive love story that shouldn't work, but does.--Deborah Levy "Wall Street Journal"
Breathless and gripping... [Crudo] traps the first summer of Trump and Brexit like a fly in amber.-- "NPR"
Laing...dunks you into the narrative and its fast-moving waters. It's only once you get to the end that you realize you've been holding your breath.-- "Vanity Fair"
Laing's experiment, and it's a good one, is to describe the world--her world, between May 17 and September 23, 2017--as precisely as she can... [Crudo is] a short, entirely readable, and lovably eccentric book.--Nick Hornby "The Believer"
Like the foodstuff for which it is named, Olivia Laing's Crudo is weird, intense, served in a small portion, and totally delicious... Beautifully written and artfully focused.--Rebecca Mead "The New Yorker"
Written with bristling intelligence... [Crudo is] about the longing to escape our ossified selves--to become, if only for moment or within the pages of a novel, someone wilder and more radically free. And in staging that longing so directly and so honestly, Olivia Laing makes Crudo her own.-- "New York Times Book Review"
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